Events

Sunday, April 28 2013

Kansas City’s story doesn’t begin with fur traders and settlers. Rather it goes back millions of years to an era of rising and falling seas, thick green forests of towering ferns, and huge, now-extinct animals. That world, as revealed by the rocks beneath our feet, is explored in the exhibit KC|BC.

KC|BC complements Kansas City Millions of Years Ago – Reading the Rocks, a current show of digital illustrations and actual fossils at the Box Gallery in Suite 211 of the Commerce Bank Building, 1000 Walnut St.

In the pre-digital era before cell phones, satellites, and the Internet allowed travelers to instantly transmit their photos and comments to family and friends, Americans relied on “snail mail” and the picture postcard.

This exhibit gathers more than 200 examples of Kansas City postcards from the ‘30s and ‘40s. The cards – featuring images of landmarks, hotels, parks, and public buildings - have been drawn from the Mrs. Sam Ray Postcard Collection in the holdings of the Library’s Missouri Valley Special Collections.

Established in 1874, the Kansas City, Missouri Police Department has for 138 years protected our citizens while keeping abreast of changes in criminology, transportation, technology, and society. This long and colorful history is examined in a new exhibit, Kansas City’s Finest.

Hixon transformed the field of portrait photography in Kansas City and the surrounding region during a career that spanned more than seven decades. His studios—the first in the Brady Building at 11th and Main Streets, and the second just one block west in the Baltimore Hotel—welcomed thousands of patrons throughout the 1910s and 1920s.

The Metropolitan Ensemble Theatre continues its seventh season of Script-in-Hand performances with an extension of 2012’s popular female-focused Women of the Years series.

Playwright Wendy Wasserstein (1950-2006) became the voice of an entire generation of women who came of age in the 1980s. In The Heidi Chronicles she follows her intelligent, well-educated heroine from college through a career as an art historian. But Heidi is less sure of herself when it comes to men.

Named for a prominent turn-of-the-century business mogul, the area around Jacob Loose Park is still one of Kansas City’s most beautiful areas largely due to the early planning of developer Jesse Clyde Nichols. Travel back in time and see the area through these views on century-old, hand-colored postcards.

Local historian and postcard collector Michael Bushnell presents a series of postcard tours of Kansas City neighborhoods. Bushnell is publisher of The Northeast News, a weekly community newspaper that serves the Historic Northeast area of Kansas City. He is also the author of Historic Postcards of Old Kansas City.